The Game by A. S. Byatt Read Free Book Online Page B

state had been thrust upon her such as she had imagined it in childhood, and not as she had in fact experienced it in the warm muddle of herGreat Ormond Street flat. Thor, naturally enough, was quite unawed by this. He was very busy, and organized everything, ordered meals, ordered people to put on gumboots and go down into the village to buy food. On Sunday, when the nurse had her day off, he took his wife, his mother-in-law, and Deborah to the Quaker Meeting-house, whilst Cassandra, who had got up very early to go to the Vicar’s communion service took her turn at sitting beside the long, slightly bubbling body of her father.
    There were only about six people at Meeting, besides the family. Julia, who, in spite of having married an active Friend, rarely went to Meeting now, found the Meeting-house, for all its scrubbed wooden bareness of benches and tables, distressing. She did not, as she imagined Cassandra did, find the house itself, or the daily routine, oppressive, but the Meeting-house, stripped for deep thought, was both the place where she had had time to examine her own moments of distress, and the place where, over the years, her family had burst out from time to time in embarrassing speech. All this formulation of thought, she said to herself, here without any framework of ritual as Cassandra has it, seems so far from the sort of thing most of us are really preoccupied with most of the time.
    She remembered her father, labouring at length, so scrupulously, blowing out his long moustache, to define the precise moral position of those who were not pacifists and believed killing was justified, then repudiating this position, equally scrupulously, absolutely finally, and, still not finished, exhorting Friends to tolerate those who killed, and ending with a flourish ‘Father forgive them, they know not what they do’. She had looked across at Cassandra, on this, who had closed her eyes and tightened her mouth in pain. Both the girls had intensely disliked the way in which Friends familiarized the terrible and made it a comfortable possession. She supposed that this might be inevitably true of all Christians. Cassandra, herself, might now be less intolerant; she had always had a proprietary interest in the terrible which might, in terms of the Church, music, painting, litany, have become in its turn anotherkind of domestication. As for herself, she was not sure how much good it did to expend a lot of thought on death and suffering at a distance. It could so easily lead to an ignoring of the little daily agonies which were all that deeply affected the fabric of her own life. She felt both determined and vaguely guilty about her shelving of the whole problem.
    She remembered Cassandra’s last appearance in the Meeting-house. By then, they were not speaking to each other, and she had been largely unaware of what Cassandra was thinking. Indeed, when she had risen pale and shivering to her feet, Julia had had a moment of fear that she was about to utter an indictment of her own duplicity with regard to Simon. But Cassandra, with what the Quakers agreed tolerantly later to have been excusably unhelpful bad taste, had lectured them with abstract passion on her reasons for leaving the Society of Friends. They had, she had told them, too simple and idealistic a view of human nature. She had been twenty at the time, with a curious maturity of phraseology and an unformed, over-expressive girl’s face. After speaking for five minutes or so she had begun to weep, pushing the tears away clumsily with the sides of her hands and still pouring out the same long, formed, urgent sentences. Julia, who agreed with her, whose views had in this area been formed by Cassandra, had been horribly embarrassed.
    ‘You never question that it is possible for us to become good,’ Cassandra cried. ‘You believe that if we try to be good we shall affect things, make other people good. You appropriate the story of the Roman senators who sat so